


Worlds Collide

by masterroadtripper



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson, Donnie Darko (2001), House M.D.
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hospital, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anxiety Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, Depression, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Recovery, Schizophrenia, canon-typical triggers, panic disorder
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:35:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27288004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterroadtripper/pseuds/masterroadtripper
Summary: Admitted to Yellow Fields In-Patient Treatment Facility at the beginning of his twelfth-grade year, Connor and his three roommates embark on the long journey to recovery.
Relationships: Evan Hansen/Connor Murphy
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	1. Chapter 1

Connor crossed his arms and glared at the doctor sitting across the table from him. The man was busy reading through what Connor could only assume were his charts. Notes upon notes about his bounce through the mental health system that eventually landed him here, at a youth long-term in-patient facility, three months before his eighteenth birthday. As it looked right now, Connor bet he’d be spending his birthday within the four walls of this old brick building on the edge of Newark.

There was one part of Connor’s mind that wanted to just jump the table and punch the doctor square across his smug looking jaw. While he knew that would do nothing other than end with him sedated and probably placed in an isolation room, Connor still felt his face pull into a little bit of a grin at the image. Maybe he shouldn’t let himself think things like that, but as Connor saw it, he was going to be trapped in the mental health system until the day he died, so he might as well have some fun with it.

“Connor, this is your schedule,” the doctor said, sliding a piece of yellow paper across the table, “the only day that is different is Sunday when you have no set activities except for attending your mealtimes.”

“Thanks?” Connor said, letting his voice just drip with sass and sarcasm. Snatching the paper from the table, not caring if it got crumpled, Connor placed it on his lap, uninterested in any of the typeface on the page.

“The nurses on your floor will be able to answer almost any questions you have, but if you have questions about your treatment program, feel free to ask when we have our sessions together,” the doctor - who still had yet to introduce himself - said, flipping through some more pages, “until then, I’ll let you head on up to your floor and get settled in. It's almost dinner time, so we will expect you to join everyone else out in the eating room by six.”

With that, the doctor was obviously done, closing his folder and handing it over to the muscle-bound, scrub clad man standing over Connor’s right shoulder. A safer, making sure that Connor didn’t actually jump the table and try to beat the snot out of the doctor.

The large man looked at whatever was written on the sticky note on the front cover of the manila envelope before muttering, “c’mon kid, let's get you to your room.”

Reluctantly, Connor followed, knowing that he was defeated for the day. Sure he was a couple of inches taller than the safer, but after the past year, there was no way he’d actually be able to hold his own against this mountain of a man. It was easier to just play along for now.

Grabbing his bag from where it was resting against the leg of the chair, Connor held onto the waistband of his sweatpants so they didn’t fall off. Not only had they taken his necklace, bracelets and shoelaces like last time, this time, they also took the string out of his hoodie and the tie out of his sweatpants. The pants, which never really fit in the first place, but now fit even less with nothing to hold them up. Usually, Connor would have just yanked the hair elastic from his hair and used that to snug some of the fabric together, but he’d had to hand that over too.

In the elevator up to the third floor, Connor stared at his reflection in the door. He had to admit, he looked bad. Like death warmed over. Which wasn’t too far from the truth, Connor noted with a half-smirk. For whatever reason, something or someone had decided that he was worth keeping alive just for shits and giggles and here he was, stuck in a hospital again.

“C’mon,” the safer grunted when the elevator door opened into a large common room.

There were a couple of kids sitting around, but with no one doing anything in particular, Connor itched to look at the yellow schedule in his pocket. Maybe they got free time before supper? Resolving to look at it once the safer left, to not give him the satisfaction of watching Connor do what the doctor wanted him to, he followed the human mountain down a hall.

About three door frames down, the man stopped and motioned to room 314, saying, “here you go kid,” before turning and walking away.

“What a warm welcome,” Connor muttered loud enough he was sure the man would have heard, but when he didn’t get a response, he manned up and entered the room.

The first thing he noticed was that there were four twin-sized beds, two along each wall, with a barred over window at the opposite side of the room from the door. One of the beds along the window wall had no stuff on or around it, so Connor figured that was his.

Taking two steps into the room, he saw something move out of the corner of his eye. Turning to look at what he’d assumed was just a fuck ugly stuffed animal, he realized that it was actually a kid sitting on the floor, his awful looking hair just poking up above the bed from where he leaned against it.

Blinking a couple of times to try to understand if he was seeing things properly, he noted that the kid had about jaw length medium brown hair, but only the top half was what was likely its natural colouring. The bottom half was what Connor assumed was probably once green, but it was also probably from a dollar store package and so the colour wasn’t very green anymore.

“Hi,” Connor said, his soft voice loud in the otherwise quiet room. The greenish-brown mop of hair shifted violently and a pair of deep brown eyes glared at Connor.

“Who are you?” the green mop asked, voice muffled and raspy.

Frowning at the kid, Connor tried to understand what he was seeing. If he’d thought that the colour choice for his hair was strange, the black non-medical mask covering from his nose to his chin and along his jawline was. Connor could feel his mouth threatening to pull into a disgusted frown, and, as much as he wanted to make a smart-ass comment about the mask, he also didn’t want to piss off the first roommate he’d met so far and so he forced his face into a half-smile.

Answering the question, Connor replied, “your new roommate.”

“Huh,” the kid said, turning his head jerkily back to what he was looking at before, which Connor could now see was a deck of cards. It didn’t look like he was playing with them, but instead just shuffling them over and over again.

Shaking his head, Connor motioned over to the empty bed diagonally across the room from Mophead's bed, “that mine?”

“Yeah,” the kid grunted, not looking up.

“Okay,” Connor said slowly before taking a couple of steps over to it and dumping his bag on top of the otherwise bare mattress.

The cards were shuffled again, the noise loud in the otherwise silent room. Connor hoped this kid didn’t do that all night too or else he really would lose his mind.

Yanking his checkered blanket out of his bag, Connor threw it onto his bed, not worrying about making it neatly like the bed directly across from his. Tucking a leg under his bum and sitting on the bed, Connor went digging for the folded piece of paper that he’d stashed in there before they’d taken his wallet and locked it in the box with his bracelets and necklace.

With his back facing the door, Connor unfolded the paper and gently slid the small stack of polaroid photos from their hiding place. A sad smile crossed his face as Connor flipped through the pictures, his heartstrings getting jerked around violently.

As blue eyes and blond hair stared back at him off the paper, Connor wondered if Evan would even want to talk with him now. After yelling at him at the hospital before he’d gotten transferred here, Evan’s horrified look told Connor everything he needed to know. He’d shown his best friend that he was truly a monster. The lengths he was willing to go to obliterate his own existence from the face of the planet. But he could dream and could remember happier times they shared together.

“Yo John, get your ass down to common, its supper time,” a nasal and pinched sounding voice shouted, accompanied by the sound of bouncing feet and a couple of smacks to the wall on either side of the door frame.

Connor almost jumped out of his skin as he turned around, frantically trying to hide his polaroids underneath his blanket.

“Who are you?” the kid, a small framed Latino boy asked, hands still lightly drumming on the wall beside the door frame. He looked at Connor like he was some kind of animal in a zoo that he'd never seen before in his life. 

“Connor Murphy,” he replied, “I just got here.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear I'm going somewhere with this.   
> I swear I'm not crazy.

“Cool,” the Latino boy said, still bouncing on the balls of his feet like a wind-up toy that just wouldn’t stop.

Connor knew that his face was entirely blank and emotionless as he pushed his matted and tangled brown hair away from his face, heart still pounding from having to hide his polaroids so quickly.

“I sleep there,” the boy continued, pointing at the neatly made bed and bouncing into the room a little, “you got Wes’s bed. Hopefully, you talk more than Wes. He never said anything, but he got out of here, so I guess he did something right.”

Connor just blinked, taking a look towards the bed across from his that the boy had pointed at before he’d started his rapid-fire bounce through whatever crossed his mind.

“Still, it's supper time, c’mon!” the boy said, turning over his shoulder and taking off down the hall.

Trying not to let his mouth fall open in confusion, Connor wondered how he’d ended up getting roomed with two weirdos. Not that Connor himself was all that normal, but compared to Mophead and the Energizer Bunny, he was pretty average.

Still, he pulled his polaroids from under his blanket, pleased that they didn’t get crinkled, and folded them back into their paper. Stuffing the paper back into his bag and pushing his bag under the low bed frame, Connor stood and headed for the door.

“You coming?” Connor asked Mophead and when the kid said nothing, shuffling through the deck of cards again, he decided it wasn’t worth an argument and left.

Holding his sweatpants the entire walk down the hall, he braced himself for the smell of actually cooked food. As much as Connor had hated the feeding tube he’d been stuck on the last month at the normal hospital, it meant he hadn’t actually had to smell, taste or swallow food. Now, this was going to be his first real meal in quite a while and he was dreading it.

Not only that he had to eat while surrounded by the prying eyes of his floormates, but whatever was cooking smelled horribly greasy. The smell alone made Connor want to run over to the nearest garbage can and gag until something happened. While it wasn’t the best idea on the planet, it was still appealing enough and he eyed the awkwardly painted can in the corner.

Deciding against it, he noticed Energizer Bunny Boy sitting at a four-person table off towards one side of the room, near yet another barred over window. At the table was another boy with dark brown hair who was messing around with his plastic fork. Most of the other tables were filled and so Connor figured that was where he was supposed to go sit. Maybe if he’d looked at his yellow paper he would have known, but again, out of principle, Connor refused to look.

He could feel everyone’s eyes on him. Usually, that’d make his skin crawl. It always did in school, when he had to give presentations or when he came in late. It was always one of the reasons he’d get high as a fucking kite on presentation days. But now, Connor knew he was pumped too full of hospital grade meds for him to panic about anything, regardless of how hard he tried.

“Hey man!” Energizer Bunny Boy shouted once he noticed that Connor was heading towards him. Under the table, he was bouncing his legs up and down, arms and hands drumming out a rhythm on his thighs.

“Hi,” Connor grunted, pulling out the nearest chair and slumping down in it, his stomach rolling and tumbling like that stupid rock tumbler he and Zoe used to screw around with in the summers when they were little.

“So, you excited for supper?” Energizer Bunny Boy asked, eyes darting around the room like if he stopped moving for even a second, he’d just explode on the spot. With a smirk, Connor wondered if that would be funny to see.

“Nope,” Connor replied, slouching even further. He wondered if he slouched far enough down if his sweatpants would drop to the floor. Connor briefly considered trying it, just to see what the nurses would do. Instead, he didn’t move and glared at the grey plastic tabletop.

“Is John coming?” Energizer Bunny Boy asked.

“Who?” Connor asked, turning his head so his hair moved out of the way of one eye and he could see his tiny table mate better.

“John. The guy sitting on the floor back at the room,” he explained, “doesn’t really like eating supper with the rest of us, but, you know, they make him, every day.”

“Usually waits till everyone leaves though,” the other boy at the table said. Connor looked over at him and found that he was still messing around with the plastic fork from before. But, obviously, he was entirely tuned in to the conversation.

Connor wondered if Mophead’s - John’s - reluctance to come and eat with the rest of them had something to do with that weird mask he was wearing. Connor would be willing to bet money on that but said nothing out loud. The two other guys didn’t seem phased by this turn of events and so Connor figured it wasn’t something to make a big deal out of.

“Yeah, they don’t let you get away without finishing your meals you know?” Energizer Bunny Boy jumped back in, “but John always waits and then eats. They let him do it though. The nurses. They’ll make you sit here until breakfast tomorrow if that's what it takes. People have tried it. Doesn’t work.”

“Shame,” Connor muttered as a plate was placed in front of him. It looked like pulled pork. Coated liberally in gravy with a bun and a helping of string beans, Connor decided that he was willing to sit at this chair every day for the next three months if that's what it took for him to not have to eat this.

“Boys, is John coming?” the lady with the food cart asked.

Connor shrugged and Energizer Bunny said, “no ma’am, don’t think so.”

“Okay, well, this plate is for him, okay? That means no taking from it, right?” she asked and Connor felt like that was a direct statement towards the Energizer Bunny himself. That he probably took from other people's plates on a regular basis simply to help maintain his high-energy habits.

Connor snorted to himself but didn’t make any move to pick up his knife, fork, or sit any closer to the table. He simply wasn’t interested and he’d rather keep whatever they’d gotten into him at the hospital where it belonged and not at the bottom of some fuck-ugly painted garbage can.

“You missed a plate,” Fork Boy said, his voice dead serious.

Intrigued, Connor looked up to see that the boy in the white tee shirt had now spun himself around to face the lady with the cart. But, all four places at their table had plates. He frowned, wondering what Fork Boy meant.

“Your plate is right there,” the lady replied with a smile as she turned to leave and head onto the next table.

“Frank needs a plate too,” the boy said, his voice still dead serious and his eyes taking on a hard glare as if she’d managed to offend him in some way.

“I’ve been roomed with a bunch of lunatics,” Connor thought to himself, closing his eyes and pressing the palms of his hands against them, “They’re all crazy.”

“Frank doesn’t need a plate, remember?” the lady said softly.

As Connor pulled his hands away from his face, he watched as she clicked a button on her belt. Now, Connor wasn’t an expert at electronics by any means, but he’d been in his fair share of hospitals, and he was convinced that that was some sort of panic button.

Was this guy hallucinating? Connor had no idea, but the staring match was on. The Fork Boy, adamant that whoever, or whatever, this Frank thing was, seemed unwilling - or unable - to back down and Connor wondered if he was about to witness a group of safers storm the floor and snatch this kid away to some backroom for him to calm down.

“Where’s your note card?” the lady asked calmly.

“I don’t want my note card fuckass,” he said, voice almost crossing over into yelling territory, “Frank is hungry!”

But before Fork Boy could continue, the Energizer Bunny reached out, stuck his hand in the grey sweatpants the other boy wore and grabbed out a bright yellow laminated notecard with a couple of lines of penned words on it.

Slapping the card down on the table in front of Fork Boy, he said, “read your fucking card Donnie.”


	3. Chapter 3

Laying back on the too-soft mattress, his red and black checkered blanket not covering enough of his body, Connor listened to his roommates chattering. It wasn’t night time yet, not even close, but they were supposed to be relaxing and calming down before bed.

The three boys seemed to know each other well. While John, the kid with a mop for hair, was still out of the room, the two remaining roommates made enough noise combined anyway. As he stared at the roof, Connor wondered what his luck was that he’d gotten such a mixed batch of roommates. The last time he ended up in-patient, he’d only had one roommate. Greg. Connor and Greg hadn’t gotten along and were roommates by the strict definition of the word.

These guys though, Connor wondered if they were here for the long haul. How long they’d already been stuck, cooped up within these four walls, to get along as they did. To know each other as they did. Connor wondered if that was an omen. That he’d been placed on this floor because the doctors expected that he was going to be here for a while.

John seemed like a decent enough guy. Aside from his hyper-fixation on the ratty deck of cards he carried around with him at all times, Connor saw something in those eyes. When the nurses had retrieved him from their room and brought him to the eating area, Connor knew there was more to the boy than met the eye. He had shaggy hair, but he didn’t hide behind it like Connor tended to do.

While he didn’t start eating until everyone had cleared out, the rest of their table included, Connor had stuck around long enough to glance over his shoulder at John. He was in the chair facing the wall, but even from the angle Connor was standing at, he thought he caught a glimpse of scarring on John’s face. He couldn’t be sure, because it was only briefly, but if he’d seen what he thought he saw, it made sense why he wore that mask. It wasn’t because he just liked to. It was because he was trying to hide something. Looking down towards his feet as the three of them walked away from John, Connor huffed out a breath of air at his own long sleeves. John wasn’t the only one trying to hide something.

From where he was now laying, Connor could tell that Fork Boy and the Energizer Bunny were sitting together on Fork Boy’s bed, discussing the anatomy of the Na’vi people from Avatar. Why they were talking about a movie that was seven years old, Connor couldn’t understand, and it made even less sense to him why they were talking about how the characters' tails were like reproductive organs.

“What if they tried to sit down?” Energizer Bunny asked.

“I mean, if it's like what they imply in the movie, I think it’d probably feel like if you just smashed your dick under your butt,” Fork Boy replied, his voice sounding nothing at all like what it had at supper when he’d claimed Frank needed a plate, but then dropped the topic silently when Energizer Bunny had snagged that notecard from his pocket.

“So does that mean that the Na’vi never sit?” Energizer Bunny asked and Connor could just hear the confusion in his voice before he added, “because I’m pretty sure they sit down in the movie.”

“Maybe it's like dogs. You know, they don’t sit on their tails, just near them,” Fork Boy mused.

At that, Connor felt a laugh bubble up into his throat, the sound sneaking out without his permission.

“What?” Fork Boy said, his voice taking on a darker tone again, “you have some opinion on this?”

“Nah,” Connor said, punching himself upright enough to look over at where the two of them were laying on their stomachs, feet and legs hanging off the side of the bed, a hardcover book open in front of them.

“What is your name anyway?” Fork Boy asked, the darkness in his voice again, but eyes straying from Connor. It felt like he was more so looking over Connor’s right shoulder and out the window instead.

“Connor,” he replied, pushing himself to sit up properly and tucking his legs under him in a criss-cross. The blanket still covering his lower half and hair falling all over the place, he watched as Fork Boy seemed to process this information. Blue eyes that were a colour to rival Evan’s, Fork Boy nodded, as if knowing Connor’s name seemed to unlock the secrets of the universe.

Energizer Bunny looked between Connor and Fork Boy, his head moving fast enough that Connor expected a dislocated neck joint, added, “Well I’m Alvie and that's Donnie.”

“And John’s still eating?” Connor asked, to confirm.

“Yup,” Energizer Bunny - Alvie - said, “probably be out there for another half hour or so. Usually is.”

Connor huffed a breath out through his nose. Alvie, Donnie and John. His roommates that he was going to be trapped with for the foreseeable future. As much as he wanted to ask why they were here, Connor didn’t want to have to share in return and instead just let the chatterboxes on the other bed fill the silence.

“He doesn’t say much,” Fork Boy - Donnie - added on, “these two were both here when I got here.”

“Some say that John was born here,” Alvie said, his voice lowering to a level that Connor would consider conspiratorial, “but that's not possible.”

“I heard Diane from down the hall say he was here when she got here,” Donnie said, looking back down at the book between him and Alvie, turning the page.

“Diane’s been here for two years or something, right?” Alvie asked.

“Or something like that,” Donnie finished, leaving Connor with a strange feeling in his heart that he couldn’t pinpoint.

He felt like something was wrapping a hand around his heart. He didn’t know for sure what that feeling really was, but he didn’t think that John could have been any older than sixteen. He was still too slight and his voice was still too high for him to be any older, and yet, from what it sounded like, mental health was already kicking his ass.

Donnie and Alvie couldn’t have been any older than Connor himself, he didn’t think. With Alvie’s energy levels alone, Connor might have guessed that he was closer to ten, but that wasn’t possible. Donnie seemed to just look battered. Like John, in a way, Connor thought. That he’d just been knocked around too much to even see a way out. Supper just seemed to prove it with that damn notecard. At least, Connor mused, he knew where it was in case something like that happened again.

Connor could remember back to a time where he didn’t feel like jumping off the roof of the school. Contrary to popular belief, Connor’s decline into depression hadn’t happened overnight. He remembered eighth grade with as much fondness as he could, but sometime in the middle of that year, the bad days started outnumbering the good days. Until there were no more good days and simply less bad ones.

He wondered if John ever had good days anymore.

He wondered if any of his roommates did. If they were capable of having one day where the mental illness baseball bat didn’t show up and knock them down again right away.

He wondered if his roommates would ever get out of here. If he would ever get out of here and see his family and Evan again.

Flopping backwards onto the mattress, Connor just wished he could turn his brain off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I'll update the tags now. 
> 
> If you missed it or haven't guessed it,   
> \- Fork Boy/Donnie is Donnie Darko from Donnie Darko (young Jake Gyllenhaal)   
> \- Energizer Bunny/Alvie is Juan "Alvie" Alverez from House MD (young Lin-Manuel Miranda)
> 
> I will reveal who John is soon, but, as always, if you have a guess, feel free to drop it in the comments!

**Author's Note:**

> Connor's three roommates are characters from other fandoms. I have not named the fandoms nor the characters in the tags yet because I don't want to spoil who they are, however, if you want to take a guess down in the comments, have at it. 
> 
> If you came here for treebros, I promise there will be treebros. It's not the main storyline, but since this is written from Connor's perspective, Evan will make appearances. 
> 
> I will try my absolute hardest to keep my portrayals of mental illness and mental hospitals as accurate as humanly possible, but I am human and I will make errors. If there is something that you think I need to correct, please comment nicely and I'll do my best. My only experiences on these topics are entirely my own and I don't claim to be an expert on these topics in any way, shape or form. 
> 
> Tags will be updated as we go along, and updates will not have any pattern.


End file.
